Paul Piff And Dacher Keltner

How awe binds us to others

The writers argue that our culture today is awe-deprived. Adults spend more time working and commuting, and less time outdoors and with other people. Camping trips and looking at midnight skies - chances to experience awe - are forgone in favour of working weekends.ST FILE PHOTO

Here's a curious fact about goosebumps. In many non-human mammals, goose bumps - that physiological reaction in which the muscles surrounding hair follicles contract - occur when individuals, along with other members of their species, face a threat.

We humans, by contrast, can get goosebumps when we experience awe, that often-positive feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world.

Why do humans experience awe? Years ago, one of us - Professor Dacher Keltner - (along with psychologist Jonathan Haidt) argued that awe is the ultimate "collective" emotion, for it motivates people to do things that enhance the greater good. Through many activities that give us goosebumps - collective rituals, celebration, music and dance, religious gatherings and worship - awe might help shift our focus from our narrow self-interest to the interests of the group to which we belong.

Now, recent research of ours, to be published in next month's issue of the Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, provides strong empirical support for this claim. We found that awe helps bind us to others, motivating us to act in collaborative ways that enable strong groups and cohesive communities.

For example, in one study, we asked more than 1,500 individuals across the United States a series of questions to assess how much awe, among other emotions, they experienced on a regular basis.

In an ostensibly unrelated part of the study, we gave each person 10 lottery tickets that would be entered in his (or her) name for a cash-prize drawing. We told each person that the tickets were his to keep but that, if he wanted to, he could share a portion of them with another unidentified individual in the study who had not received any tickets.

We found that participants who reported experiencing more awe in their lives, who felt more regular wonder and beauty in the world around them, were more generous to the stranger. They gave approximately 40 per cent more of their tickets away than did participants who were awe-deprived.

Some of this research was conducted on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, which has a spectacular grove of eucalyptus trees- a source of awe for anyone who walks by. So we took participants there and had them either look up into the trees or look at the facade of a nearby building, for one minute. Then, a minor "accident" occurred (a planned part of the experiment): A person dropped a handful of pens. Participants who had spent the minute looking up at the tall trees - not long, but long enough, we found, to be filled with awe - picked up more pens to help the other person.

In other experiments, we evoked feelings of awe in the lab, for example, by having participants recall and write about a past experience of awe or watch a five-minute video of sublime scenes of nature. Participants experiencing awe, more so than those experiencing emotions like pride or amusement, cooperated more, shared more resources and sacrificed more for others - all of which are behaviours necessary for our collective life.

In still other studies, we have sought to understand why awe arouses altruism of different kinds. One answer is that awe imbues people with a different sense of themselves, one that is smaller, more humble and part of something larger. Our research finds that even brief experiences of awe, such as being amid beautiful tall trees, lead people to feel less narcissistic and entitled, and more attuned to the common humanity people share with one another. In the great balancing act of our social lives, between the gratification of self-interest and a concern for others, fleeting experiences of awe redefine the self in terms of the collective and orient our actions toward the needs of others.

You could make the case that our culture today is awe-deprived. Adults spend more and more time working and commuting, and less time outdoors and with other people. Camping trips, picnics and midnight skies are forgone in favour of working weekends and late at night. Attendance at arts events has dropped over the years.

This goes for children too: Arts and music programmes in schools are being dismantled in lieu of programmes better suited to standardised testing; time outdoors and for novel, unbounded exploration is sacrificed for resume-building activities.

We believe that awe deprivation has had a hand in a broad societal shift that has been widely observed over the past 50 years: People have become more individualistic, more self-focused, more materialistic and less connected to others.

To reverse this trend, we suggest that people insist on experiencing more everyday awe, to actively seek out what gives them goosebumps, be it in looking at trees or the quotidian nobility of others - the teenage punk who gives up his seat on public transportation, the young child who explores the world in a state of wonder, the person who presses on against all odds. All of us will be better off for it.

NEW YORK TIMES

Paul Piff is an assistant professor of psychology and social behaviour at the University of California, Irvine. Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Straits Times

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